His youngest child, a
smallish 13-year-old, bludgeoned, his
body lying just off a path winding
through woods east of Erie, a mile from
home.

"It's a strange
thing," Brine said last week. "Right out
of the clear, I can see his body at the
hospital when I went to identify him."

Brine, 71, is a
retired welder and former school bus
driver who had quadruple bypass surgery
14 months ago.

"When it happens,
when I see this, it's not good for an
old man."

It's been 20 years
and three weeks since an Erie County
jury sent 22-year-old Alan Pursell,
whose unbroken history of drug abuse
dated to age 7, to Death Row for beating
eighth-grader Christopher Brine with a
rock, strangling him with a tree limb
and leaving him bloodied and naked.

Stirred periodically
by a flow of appeals, the case never
quite died. Now, it awakens again, with
a ruling from a federal judge in another
appeal upholding Pursell's murder
conviction but throwing out the death
sentence.

In a 212-page
opinion, Chief U.S. District Judge D.
Brooks Smith, sitting at the federal
court in Johnstown, ruled that there
were no verdict-rocking mistakes in the
trial.

But in a separate
hearing, where jurors weighed the death
penalty, Pursell's attorney laid out an
"anemic" case, Smith wrote.

It never touched on a
life that reads like a horror story --
Pursell born to an alcoholic prostitute,
surrendered at age 4 through an adoption
sealed in a barroom, beaten and sexually
abused by his adoptive father.

Had he offered that
to jurors, Smith wrote, Pursell's trial
attorney "could have added flesh, bones,
a mind and a heart to Alan Pursell."

With Smith's ruling,
lawyers have quick decisions to make to
meet the federal 30-day appeal deadline.

Erie County
prosecutors could walk away from the
case and let the convicted killer, now
42, live out his life in prison without
chance of parole.

His defense team, the
Defender Association of Philadelphia, a
nonprofit agency, could renew its fight
against the murder conviction.

Erie County
prosecutors could appeal in the federal
system to reinstate Pursell's death
sentence. Or they could let the ruling
stand and ask that a new Erie County
jury be seated 20 years after the fact
to consider reimposing the death
penalty.

"I don't know if
anything like that's ever been done,"
said Kenneth Zak, an assistant district
attorney who inherited the case 11 years
ago.

If Richard Brine has
his way, it will be. "I want to see the
death penalty, yes indeed," he said.
"You take a life sentence and, yeah,
that's still living better than most
people live."

For now, both sides
are sorting through the 212 pages in
Smith's opinion.

"It takes time to
read it a few times," said Stuart Lev, a
lawyer with the Defender Association.

The case began after
supper July 23, 1981, when Christopher
Brine rode off on his bicycle from his
home in Wesleyville to the bike paths in
Lawrence Park Township a mile from home.

He was a small,
skinny boy, the youngest of eight
children.

"He was just
blooming," his father said.

Christopher Brine
might have taken a special shine to his
bronze-colored bike because it gave him
mobility in a way that his own legs
couldn't; with one leg shorter than the
other, the youngster ran with a limp.

But he never came
home.

The next day,
Christopher's body was found in a
clearing near the path, a scene of
incongruity.

His face had been
bludgeoned, probably pounded 15 times
with a rock, but his shoes were placed
neatly beside the body and his pants
were folded carefully over a tree limb.

Pursell, who lived
with his mother in a mobile home park
five blocks from the Brine home, was
arrested a few days later.

Police, working
before DNA technology was developed,
retrieved Pursell's shoes and found
spatters of blood that didn't match his.
With that came a twist that seemed
stolen from the notorious Leopold and
Loeb murder case that gripped the nation
seven decades earlier.

In that case, Nathan
Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both
sons of privilege, plotted the murder of
a youngster as almost an intellectual
exercise in building the perfect crime.
But the plot came undone and both were
convicted after Leopold's eyeglasses,
distinctive because of a hinge offered
by a single Chicago optometrist, were
found near the body.

Near Christopher
Brine's body, too, police found a pair
of glasses.

The prescription was
so rare, a local optometrist, Dr. Moody
Perry testified, that he wrote only one
prescription like it in six years. It
was for Alan Pursell. And, in a point
Pursell denied, Perry said Pursell
turned up at his office the day after
the killing, seeking a replacement pair.

Three days after
that, as police withheld information
about finding the glasses, Pursell and
friend Diane Walters watched a
television news report about the crime,
Walters later testified. Pursell turned
and asked whether a person's identity
could be traced through his glasses, she
said.

The bloodied shoes and the glasses
"established a solid foundation for
Pursell's guilt," Smith wrote. Indeed,
in short order, a jury convicted Pursell,
a man who sported a "Born to raise hell"
tattoo but carried a criminal past that
consisted only of a go-cart theft and a
$191 bad-check charge.

Prosecutors offered no motive for
the homicide. Shortly after the murder,
police suggested in a search-warrant
affidavit that the killing was part of a
sexual assault. But Pursell was never
charged with any sex crimes, and the
theory never resurfaced when the case
went to trial.

In May 1999, Pursell, at the
maximum-security state prison in Greene
County, was nudged closer to the state
death chamber when then-Gov. Tom Ridge
signed his death warrant. Twelve days
later, though, Smith stayed the warrant
when he got Pursell's appeal -- one of a
20-year series he filed through
attorneys or authored himself.

"It just seems like appeal and
appeal and appeal," Brine said.

The appeal to Smith, though, gets
him off Death Row.

Purcell's appeal contended that
the Erie County trial shortchanged him
in a number of ways, from refusing a
change of venue to prosecutors' failure
to disclose what he said was evidence
that a man who didn't fit his
description was soliciting sex from
local youngsters. Peppered throughout
the appeal were claims that his defense
attorney was ineffective.

In court, Smith wrote, Pursell's
attorney tried to fend off the death
sentence only by saying that the
defendant was young, had a girlfriend,
carried a bland criminal record and
wanted to live. By Smith's account, that
paled next to "powerful evidence that
should have been presented."

The 4-year-old that Pursell's
prostitute mother surrendered to another
woman was filthy and malnourished.

When a man came calling at his
adoptive mother's house, Pursell
announced, "Lay down. Man here. Make
money," the judge wrote. By age 7,
Pursell was sniffing glue; as a
teen-ager, he habitually huffed
solvents, the court record says.

Zak countered last week that
Pursell's story of abuse surfaced only
when the appeal arrived in federal court
in 1999 and was never mentioned in
previous appeals Pursell filed. He won't
say whether he considers the claims
suspect.

Sydney, Australia -- Jan. 18, 2000
-- Imagine having to drive every day
past the site where your daughter was
raped and murdered.

Then imagine arriving at work and
having to confront some of the suspects
in the unsolved case.

For Lorraine and Greg Bright of
Gulgong, near Mudgee, this is reality -
a reality they can no longer endure.

The couple, whose 17-year-old
daughter, Michelle, was murdered, will
leave Gulgong, their home of 16 years,
this week and move to the Hunter Valley.

"That's what hurts me the most -
that we've been pushed out of our home,
our town and our jobs by this incident,"
Mrs. Bright says.

"It's not just us that's angry;
the town's angry that this has happened.
We moved here because it was a safe
haven to bring up our three kids, and we
got this dealt to us."

The most difficult part of all is
that Mrs. Bright believes people in the
town know who was responsible for her
daughter's death, but are afraid to tell
police.

Michelle Bright was sexually
assaulted and killed in the early hours
of February 27 last year. Her semi-naked
body was found beside the road less than
a kilometre from her home.

Earlier that night, Michelle had
been at a friend's 15th birthday party,
and was last seen by two friends who
dropped her off in Gulgong's main
street. What happened after that is
unknown.

Police will not disclose the cause
of Michelle's death, but confirm they
have found several items crucial to the
investigation.

Fourteen men, aged between 16 and
45, have provided police with blood and
hair samples for DNA testing.

Of those, eight attended the same
party as Michelle. Two others were
locals, two were from Sydney and two
from Queensland.

Detective Inspector David Payne,
of Mudgee police, says all 14 men remain
"persons of interest." It is possible
more than one person was involved in the
crime, he says.

Inspector Payne says there were
problems with the DNA tests because
Michelle's body was exposed to the
elements for a week before she was
found.

"We're in the process of seeing
whether we can get DNA from other items
found at the scene."

Gulgong's young people,
particularly, seem reluctant to help
police with their inquiries, Inspector
Payne says.

"People are obviously feeling some
pressure as a result of the
investigation."

Anger and frustration have
consumed the Brights' lives. Mrs.
Bright, who worked at the Gulgong RSL
Club, has had to serve men who might
have killed her daughter and those who
may know something.

She's had to watch Michelle's
friends celebrate their 18th birthdays,
get their drivers' licenses and prepare
for the HSC.

The only route from the Brights'
home to the town is past the site where
their daughter was murdered. A cross
adorned with flowers and a photograph is
a constant reminder.

For the past two months, the
Brights have been gradually moving their
belongings to their new home in the
Hunter Valley.

Yesterday, they took the final,
most painful, step: packing up
Michelle's bedroom.

"I've been putting this off for so
long that I keep taking her clothes out
of the wardrobe, then hanging them back
up," Mrs. Bright says, holding
Michelle's school sweater with "Shell"
(her nickname) on the back.

"We've had a lot of advice to get
rid of the memories, but it's just too
soon."

Mrs. Bright will make up
Michelle's room in their new home.

"I just can't pack it all up -
that would be like saying goodbye
forever."

The family can't begin to grieve
until justice is done, Mrs. Bright says.

"I just wish someone would come
forward and give us some sort of peace,
because every day is like a living
nightmare."